History

19th century coat of arms of Upper
Silesia.

At the time of Svatopluk I and King
Arnulf of Carinthia in the ninth
century, Silesia was a part of Greater Moravia and after its destruction in
the early tenth century it was conquered by Bohemia. A number of earlier inhabitants of Silesia,
the Silingi, remained throughout and they
concentrated around the Zobten mountain and
in a settlement named Niempsch (derived
from a Slavic name for Germans).

In the 19th century Upper Silesia became an industrial area using
its plentiful coal and iron
ore.

In 1919
after World War I, the eastern part,
which had majority of ethnic Poles, came under Polish rule as the
Autonomous
Silesian Voivodeship, while the mostly German-speaking western part
remained part of the German Reich as the Province of Upper Silesia.
From 1919-1921 three Silesian
Uprisings occurred among the Polish-speaking populace of Upper
Silesia; the Battle of Annaberg
occurred within the region in 1921. In the Upper Silesia plebiscite a vote of
60 to 40 percent voted against joining to Poland, with clear lines
dividing Polish and German communities. The exact border, the
maintenance of cross-border railway traffic and other necessary
co-operations as well as equal rights for all inhabitants in both
parts of Upper Silesia were fixed by the German-Polish Accord
on East Silesia, signed in Geneva on May 15, 1922.
On June
20 Germany de facto ceded the eastern parts of Upper Silesia,
becoming part of the Autonomous Silesian
Voivodeship of Poland.

After
1945 almost all of Upper Silesia the was not ceded to Poland in 1922 was
transfered to this state. A majority of the German-speaking
population was expelled in accordance with the decision of the
victorious Allied powers at their 1945 meeting at Potsdam. This expulsion program also
included German speaking inhabitants of Lower Silesia, eastern
Pomerania, Gdańsk (Danzig), and East Prussia. These German
expellees were transported to the present day Germany (including
the former East
Germany), and they were replaced with Poles, many from
former Polish provinces taken over by the USSR in the east.
A good many German-speaking Upper Silesians ended up being
relocated in Bavaria. A small part of Upper Silesia stayed as part
of Czechoslovakia as Czech
Silesia.

The expulsions of German-speakers did not totally eliminate the
presence of a population that considered itself German. Upper
Silesia in 1945 had a considerable number of Roman Catholic mixed
bilingual inhabitants that spoke both German and Polish dialects,
and their Polish linguistic skills were solid enough for them to be
allowed to remain in the area. With the fall of communism and
Poland joining the European Union, there were enough of these
remaining in Upper Silesia to allow for the recognition of a German
minority by the Polish government.

Major cities and towns

(All in Poland unless otherwise indicated; population figures are
for 1995)